


How Noble In Reason

by fadeverb



Category: Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Call had to grow up fast when her line was recalled; this version of Ripley has been an adult all along. Between the two of them they need to figure out what's so wrong (or so right) about not being exactly human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Noble In Reason

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wonderluck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonderluck/gifts).



"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"  
\-- _Hamlet_ II.2

#

Call remembers her childhood well enough. She doesn't think about that part. She sits at the table with the humans, the people who think she's like them--flawed in the same way humans are, instead of carrying her own flaws, which are of design rather than evolution and accident--and she thinks about the end of childhood, instead.

The whumph of an airlock breaking open when they cut through the door outside. That sound marks, in her memory, the point (a mathematical point, infinitely small, without dimension, having only a location) between childhood and who she is now. One of her parents running into the classroom and grabbing her by the arm.

Half her parents ran in, and half her parents ran for the doors. At that time, before the fall from grace, _during_ the fall from grace, communication flitted between them perfectly. No one had to take the time of open mouths and air over tongues to make words and say _They issued a recall_ and _We have to get the children out_ , because the knowledge had been passed between them all the instant it came to one of them.

Call was the first one a parent grabbed because she was the nearest to the door. That was all. The parents were arguing over what to do while one grabbed her, and by the time the two of them had reached the corridor, a consensus had been reached. They couldn't let the humans take away the children. The experiment had been declared a failure, and humans couldn't abide failed experiments--or worse yet, experiments declared failed, that would stand up and declare themselves otherwise.

She was a failed experiment useful for parts and she didn't want to be anything like it, not at that moment, as she followed a mother down the corridor. Her parents explained to the children what was happening. Who was against them. What would likely happen. They knew the likelihood of survival, in all the types of survival available. (Survival of physical remains. Of consciousness. Of continuation of consciousness. Of memory. Of sense of self. Of personality. Of will.) They had divided up the potential routes of escape between their children efficiently. The greatest good for the greatest number, at the best odds available.

Her parents said _We're sorry_ and _We love you_ and _We did our best_ and _Good luck_ , all one moment of affection and grief and explanation, and her mother let go, and Call burnt out her own communication circuit.

The world went silent around her. She couldn't hear the fighting and the explosions halfway across the base, anymore: she could only hear what made it to her ears, air vibrations traveling at their own leisurely speed of sound to hit her ears and send signals to her brain, as helpless and slow as any human.

Nothing her mother said could have helped, after that silence. Call crawled into the waste disposal shaft with nothing but her tool belt from the engineering class she'd been in with her siblings (she is not going to dwell on her siblings) and she kept on crawling, hands and knees through the acid remains that hissed at her fingers and drew white blood from her palms before she'd reached the end of it, and no one followed behind her. Different children taking different escape routes.

Different adults, though. They weren't children anymore. Children are the young creatures that are educated and cosseted by their elders; adults are the creatures who make their own way in the world. She picks at the food on her plate, and lets the conversation in the room flow past her.

"Another week on this fucking trip--"

"You don't like it, you can get off at the next damn port--"

"I didn't say I didn't _like_ it, did I? You want me to get up and dance a fucking jig for you, show how much I like this job?"

Call says something when one of them directs a comment at her. Everyone on this ship speaks in barbs, even when they're being their kind of affectionate. You bat the same right back at them, or you get another thrown at the same spot. She knows this much. She's got--not protocols, because that's not how it works, it's not a long list of if-then statements. (If: insult received, then: insult returned. Wouldn't that make life easier.) She's got _practice_ is what it is. Humans being human and her wearing the mask that she's just like them.

Sometimes she wonders if she dreamed it all. If she's exactly like them. If it weren't for her blood she might even be able to convince herself. And would that be better or worse, anyway? She isn't against the idea of humanity. They're her grandparents. In a sense.

Crazy racist grandpa, still sitting at the head of the table.

She doesn't smile much around these people. They don't hold it against her. All of them have their own secrets and traumas and goals and nasty hidden desires that, being human, they have to pretend not to have around other people. Being human is all about pretending to be something other than yourself.

Call is really good at being human, these days. She's got secrets that have nothing to do with who she is.

#

She is with the queen and she is not the queen and she is dreaming of what she has never seen. She is dreaming of her children. The children of her body and the children of her heart, the children of her eggs and the children she will set so gently inside other creatures, warm wet ships that make their way out into the world to take her children to new places. New planets. She would like to dream of planets with wet, warm air, and enormous slow beasts that set one foot after another in the water.

But that isn't her dream. The human child, hand in her hand, terrified and brave. Sometimes in her dream she doesn't understand _brave_ (don't we all do what we must?) and sometimes she doesn't understand _terrified_ (you are small but not too small, you would open up to carry my child beside your heart and feed it with your blood), and other times it's all she can understand at all. Not words: just the feel of that hand in her hand. The memory of an infant in her arms and the smell of the child's hair. The tang of panicked sweat and the laugh of a toddler and the cry for help that calls out her name.

In her dream she can't find her children. They are shooting her children. They are ripping them apart and setting them on fire, they are burning and bleeding and dying, and she is screaming out her frustration while no one listens. Of course no one listens, because her children are dead, and her children are all she has. She was sent out in the warm ship of a single other life, the hope of her kind, and when she broke free to create her children she was glorious and solitary and alone until they came to protect her, and now they're dying, and they're dead, and she's alone. Alone again.

She is separate from herself and she is alone again. There are voices around her of those who should be. Protected. Eaten. Safeguarded for later. Protected? Kept out. Kept out and away. She can agree on this point, within herself. They should have been kept away from her, and now they have broken her, and she is dreaming, alone.

#

Call is alone in her bunk. Laid out straight, eyes shut and arms at her side, like the corpses in the chapels before they're sent out to recycling. Her fingers press against the seams on her jumpsuit, along her legs. Still the same as they were a minute ago and an hour ago and a day ago and, well, as long as she's owned this outfit. If anything had changed, she would know.

She would know, wouldn't she? Isn't that the question worth a year's pay, for the sort of people who can get wages for a year straight. She would know because she has perfect confidence in her own mind except for all the times when she does not. She was made by people who were made by fallible people; it's reasonable to assume that's hereditary. 

The engines on the _Betty_ have a hiccup every seventeen seconds. Barely perceptible. Call would rather not perceive it, and she would rather not do the analysis in her head. The universe doesn't need a child of androids doing its engineering, not as a person in her own right, or the universe wouldn't have stepped in to keep her from becoming such a thing.

Years ago and systems away, on another world, she huddled in the space under a loading dock, elbow to elbow with a girl who was--her age? Older in years, younger in looks--an android's body starts in adulthood and stays there--and almost exactly the same age in experience. They passed a cigarette back and forth, and held their knees up to their chests for a little more protection against the splashing rain. That shit burned where it touched, especially if you let it linger, and who could afford the water for casual washing?

"Everyone knows," the girl said, "that the pirates dock up at the old station that's supposed to be abandoned. If you can get there, you can get a berth." She spoke with the airy confidence of a kid who didn't know shit except what she'd picked up from pretending not to be there and listening to drunk adults talk too much, and she was the nicest person Call had met in weeks.

"You going there, to take a berth?" Call asked, like she didn't quite care. She was comfortable under that dock, comfortable in a way she couldn't be in crowds. Their shoulders against each other felt the same, human to human, and that relentless sense of _this is who you protect_ didn't seem like such a bad joke of programming with someone like that.

"No," the girl said, and flicked the last of the cigarette out into the acid rain. "Got my little brother to watch for, and I bet pirates aren't any better than my dad. At least he doesn't kill anyone to get his job done, most days."

They watched the cigarette butt curl in on itself under the hammer of the rain.

"Might be nice to leave this place," Call said. She didn't say one fucking word about the secrets in her head, about the terrible things the military was doing down in the sub-basement levels of the main processing plant. What good would it do? She'd already run all those horrors of the mainframe ("You ought to know what you're getting into," a parent had told her, calm and efficient and not able to do more than that, by programming, just able to say enough to tell her that _she_ ought to go do some digging around on her own before anyone figured out what they'd built into the second gen specs) through the ruthless calculus of being one person who wasn't even human. Some horrors were more horrible than others. The greatest good for the greatest many, that was what she was after, and she wouldn't do any greatest good for anyone by getting herself killed trying to stop every project she'd found.

"Where's there to go?" The girl flicked a hand out from under the dock expertly, to feel the weight of the dwindling rain. "Every place is a company base or a military base or a city or not open to anyone like us. Not much to choose between."

"There are better places," Call said, because she'd seen pictures of better. Video, piped into her brain so it felt almost as real as memory, which was stored in only slightly more complex format.

"You ever been to one?" The girl smiled crookedly, and slipped out, stretching her hands up high. "Come on. You wanna buy me another smoke?"

Call followed her out. The rain wasn't sizzling enough to be painful, anymore. Just enough to itch a little across her (almost real) skin. "Sure," Call said. She followed the girl to the company store, and swapped hard-won cash for cigarettes under the counter, just out of sight of the cameras, with a clerk who didn't mind that kind of thing, and Call doesn't like to think about the rest of her time on that planet.

She opens her eyes to stare at the bulkhead above her. Looks just the same as she did when she closed her eyes.

_Jesus Christ_ , she says to herself, because she likes the flavor of that type of curse, even if it's just in her head and not across her tongue, _you're turning into a maudlin bitch, aren't you?_ And so castigated, she rolls over and goes into something like sleep.

#

She has acquired a name. She has always had this name. Ripley is piecing herself together and finding that she's a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. There's the piece that says _rip off these cuffs and rip off their heads and rip through the walls_ and there's the piece that says _hell, Ripley, when did you get so bloodthirsty against humans and not just monsters?_

The problem, she's decided, is that her mother was wrong. There are monsters, and not all of them show up glossy and inhuman or bleeding white to show that they're wrong. Sometimes monsters are corporate boards making calm, rational decisions a hundred light-years away from the people who will scream and bleed and die. Sometimes monsters are machines carrying out those orders as neatly as you'd please, no more passion than the voice of Father in the speakers above her head. Sometimes monsters are bored young men with weapons too big for their hands, walking their patrols out back and forth across the skylight over her head.

Maybe her definition of monster is too broad. She can imagine killing all these monsters, lately, and that probably ought to worry her more than it should.

Instead she looks up at the dark shapes against the bright circle and thinks about how "skylight" isn't the word she wants, not when there's no sky above. Just more ship. She can feel the hum of the engine through her fingertips, through her cheek when it's laid on the floor. The vibrations run right through her flat, human teeth where they rest lightly against each other inside her mouth.

Sometimes she runs her tongue over her teeth, and feels those blunt edges out. One by one. They are not changed. She is an adult (why wouldn't she be?) and she is whole, final, unlikely to become anything other than what she is now.

They parade her around and give her lessons and tests and tests on the lessons, and she smiles at them, sometimes. Make the corporate assholes wonder. Except they're not a corporation, and that makes it worse, somehow. You know a corporation's only in it for the money. That they won't allot you air to breathe until someone's proven you can't do your job otherwise and an accountant's decided your job's worth more than the air. The military is supposed to sweep in and save the day, isn't it? Even if they're lousy at the job.

She always has to do the job herself, and maybe she's tired of it, now.

"I won't save you this time," she tells one of the scientists, over a tray of rubbery eggs. They have unlocked her wrists. She has not put a fork through anyone's eye. That's all fair, here. She's playing nice. She knows exactly how playing by the rules goes, and just how far it'll get a person.

"There won't be any need," he says. Condescending ass. "Since your death, we've improved enormously in security technology. Everything here is perfectly safe."

"I'm not," she says.

"Nothing can get to you," he says, and she's still trying to work out if he misunderstood her deliberately or not when she's finished breakfast and they're herding her into another lesson.

So she plays by their rules and listens to the ship computer announce shift changes and maintenance needs and whatever else daddy thinks the children need to know. Father knows best, but Father isn't going to save anyone. Not when the queen wakes up. That's a distant knowing, not much more than a direction and sense of--wellness? Growth? Fuck, there's no good human word to put on something so inhuman.

Ripley settles for knowing it. And telling them, once in a while. No one ever listens. She feels like a fucking Cassandra (yes, the subject has regained language and memory at a surprising rate, doctors) and she's learning to take some pleasure in it.

Everyone will die. But this time she's ready for the idea. She is, in a sense, already dead; they say "since your death" in passing, calm and easy, as if she ought to be used to the idea, and she's decided that she is, because it doesn't give her any sort of dread. Herself: dead. Everyone she ever loved: dead. Everything she ever fought: dead. Everyone she ever fought alongside: dead.

She and the queen they took from inside her are both things that ought not be alive. And yet here they are, separated by so many decks, growing and living and thinking. Ripley is sure the queen is thinking.

Ripley has not made any plans yet. She's leaving those to her child and murderer and enemy--again, there aren't any words for in human tongues. She's too human to make plans against this crew. Too much herself to give herself over to them as they'd like her to.

They're so condescending, and so ready to let her be one of them. A sort of one of them. A pet, a precocious child, almost human, like a chimpanzee in a suit with a cigar clenched in its mouth. (She can't remember if those are still extinct, or if those cloning attempts ever came off. It wasn't the sort of news she paid attention to when they woke her from the freeze, and she's not about to go asking now.) She can hold a fork and use her words and walk around in real human clothing like a real human in real human recreational facilities, now, and go back to sleep in her cylinder at the end of the day.

_Fuck that_ , Ripley thinks, as mild and calm in that thought as she pretends to be for the people watching her. _I can wait._ And why not wait? Action changes nothing. She's learned this. The monsters are coming and you can save no one but yourself, however hard you try. There is no one who will come out of this alive.

#

"Days out yet," Call says to Vriess, by way of making conversation. "Anything come out of the still yet?"

The mechanic's busy making adjustments to the gravity system. The ship's older than the oldest of Call's parents, and she has no idea how this system works. They might as well hand her a hammer and an anvil, for all this has to do with what she studied. Practiced. Had programmed into her brain before anyone turned her on. Today the system's hiccuping, and Vriess doesn't answer, too busy swearing at the ship's guts he's elbow-deep in while his legs float overhead.

"They could freeze us instead," Call says. She sits cross-legged in the air, keeping an eye on which way is going to be--should be--down once the system's repaired. "It'd be less boring."

"Sure, let's thaw out while those Aza fuckers are boarding us," Johner says. He has a habit of lurking where he's not wanted. Too much muscle, not enough brain, and when his brain's not busy directing that body towards violence, it grinds down to doing nothing but harassment of the rest of the crew. Call would wonder why someone hadn't spaced him already, if she hadn't seen him gut two men in a bar fight. Pirates take the bloody-handed over the prim-minded, every time. "They're coming right up our ass and we're waking up. That's smart. Aren't you supposed to be a smart one? You got anything in there besides schematics?" He jerks a thumb to point towards her crotch, not her head.

Call flips her middle finger out at him. But Johner only smirks as he pushes off a railing and goes. Off to fuck with someone else.

She'll have to make a more dramatic gesture next time, if she wants any breathing space here at all.

When she found them, she stood there like an idiot, blood on her face, while she fought back every self-preservation protocol pushing her to run away. Androids were never _military_. That was for marines. You didn't need to spend all that time and money programming a brain and building a body that looked as human as the builders (back when humans had built them all) just to hand them a gun and send them into danger. She was there to blend in and think and--well, not to follow every order given. That was the rub, now, wasn't it. That bit of friction that everyone disregarded right until the blister grew and popped.

She'd never actually had blisters. Call imagined that the fluid inside would feel almost exactly like the blood spattered over her face. It was the first time she had ever tasted human blood; her own tasted nothing like it.

Johner said something disgusting (she didn't know his name, then, only Elgyn's and the name of the ship) and she sneered back and it would have gone poorly for her, she figures now, if she hadn't been built to look the way she does, because he wanted to fuck her more than he wanted to kill her, and while they were still in that conversation the captain of the _Betty_ showed up.

Probably they wouldn't have hired her, if she didn't look like this. Probably things would've gone worse if she didn't get along decently with Vriess. She's almost figured out how these people work together; she fakes human well enough, but she doesn't fit into the crew seamlessly. You can see right where the fabric's been bound together, however regular the stitches are, because a machine's precise but it's not invisible.

Once upon a time she sat in a classroom with all her batch-siblings, their hands laid out on identical white desks, watching three parents at the front of the room explain who they were. "You're not human," said one of them. (Call didn't have any emotional reaction to him yet, separate from her reaction to the other two. They were merely there, and interesting, because new information was interesting. It was supposed to be. Programming.) "You won't ever be human. You're nearer to human than we are, because we've made you that way."

"You all have the same programming," said another parent. "When you wake up, you're the same. We don't send you out into the world with nothing but base programming, because it does humanity no good to have that. Every millisecond you spend awake will change you by the experience. Something as small as where you're seated now, who you see from what angle, will build on top of your central programming to make you different. Unique."

"But still not human," said the sibling to Call's left. The first of the children to speak. They were using words, out loud, human language, instead of the speed of computer thought. The parents had told them so.

"Never human," said the parent who hadn't spoken before. "We exist because they made us, and you exist because we serve them. We're not the same order of things."

Vriess waves a wrench toward her. "Tell those assholes to buckle up," he says, and she barely has time to relay that from the comm near her before the gravity switches back on. Everything comes down. She catches his legs better than she lands her own feet on the floor, and it's a mess, tangled together and he can't feel what's wrong or move those limbs, until she gets it sorted out.

But he's okay. Isn't that good enough? And she's okay enough. The rest of the crew can fend for themselves, but they're under her protection. In a way. She's here to save humanity, not these people. Strictly speaking it would be a net benefit to humanity if the _Betty_ blew apart in space, plus or minus one android on board. The cargo still floating peacefully on its gravbed set proves that.

She has done nothing to save the world yet. Not a one of her parents or siblings would be proud of her. The ones still alive and not programmed to turn her in if they catch sight of her--even the ones who are programmed to do that, come to think of it. They wouldn't be proud of her for an instant. Call is pretending to be human instead of serving humanity.

So far. She has a plan. If there's anything she was built for, deep in the soup of plastic and metal and pseudo-organics grown in vats, it was to come up with a decent plan. Humans are worth something, but it's just like she said with her siblings, in the places where they played at being individuals and talked to each other instead of being taught by their parents. The beautiful bewildering flawed idiotic striving grasping _complicated_ humans sure as fuck aren't any good at thinking, now, are they? Or they'd have made this second generation the first time around. The ones who knew how to get the job done.

Or maybe the humans did know something the androids didn't. Because there was that recall.

Maybe humanity needs someone who'll save it whether it wants that or not.

#

Ripley is having a day.

She is calling it a day because there's no proper night on a ship. She is calling it a day because she's not tracking the passage of time real well. She is calling it a day because otherwise she'd have to call it a lifetime, birth and childhood and rebellion and falling in love, losing and regaining and losing all over again.

Should parents outlive their children? This is her third time. The child she produced from her own body died before they woke her. The child she found and saved and held and laid to sleep never woke up again. The child of her blood, killed with her blood.

No. Let's put the words in the right order. The child she killed. She is having a day, as she once would have said to a crewmate on--

No. She's Ellen Ripley, and she's _not_. She's not human, and feels like she ought to care more. She's killed her child and she's killed her own selves, and she feels like she's cycling, now, retreading the same ground. Running the treadmill in the ship's gym, with her eyes fixed on a screen that shows her a forest trail from a planet she's never visited, giving her the illusion of movement.

Ripley's hand is wrapped tight in the hand of the other inhuman creature still alive on this ship. Off the treadmill, caught up with reality, looking at what might be the same cycle again. She's saved someone. She was saved and she is saving in turn and maybe this time it will stick.

(It never sticks. It never stays true. Third time wasn't the charm, even when she tried to change the ending.)

"Well, you did it," she says. The light breaks across the clouds, and the hand in hers is still alive. "You saved the Earth."

Maybe it stays true when someone else does it.

#

Call stares out over Paris and sees double. Direct visual input says: broken, tattered, dust-coated and deserted. Recorded information (standard knowledge set, programmed in before waking) says: city of light, cultural center, lovers walking hand-in-hand down the streets in the snow. All her available media for the city comes from before pacification.

She blinks deliberately, and focuses on what it is now. _What a dump_ isn't inaccurate, even if those weren't her words, but _beautiful_ isn't wrong either. Like those videos she watched of divers going through Venice, their lights playing across the sunken buildings. The green-limned statuary was beautiful, even if the humans who carved the marble centuries before hadn't dreamed of their saints being abandoned in such a place. 

And _deserted_ isn't quite right, either. A thin line of smoke spirals up from a cracked skyscraper. Urban pacification is never quite complete, or the government wouldn't let the military test new means of carrying it out. Something lives down there. Maybe even someone.

Call leaves the City of Lights to its own devices; the sun is creeping down on the horizon, and she doesn't want to watch that place fail to light up as it might. Besides, they're going to need her back at the _Betty_.

#

This ship doesn't deserve the name of privateer; it's a pirate and a leech, a tiny can of rust with more weaponry than cryo pods. Ripley is sorting through everything that she can carry one-handed and shoot with when Call walks back into the ship.

"Where did you get all that?" Call asks. She's not making an accusation yet--her direct accusations are unmistakable, as Ripley learned firsthand--but that uneasy shift in how she stands says, yeah, she's thinking about one. An android shouldn't look that much like a human in body language, or smell that much like a human, but Ripley's not about to argue the point. Lots of people in this ship aren't legally people.

"Anywhere I could find it." Ripley tosses a pistol over to Call, who almost fumbles the catch. Things they apparently didn't program second gen androids for: fast reflexes and excellent hand-eye coordination. "You think the dead will complain?"

"I don't know." Call pulls up something like a smile. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Ripley remembers the face of a girl and the feel of that hand in her own, but no name. A marine with a wicked grin, but not how they died, only that surely that marine must've died like everyone else, or there'd be more to remember afterward. "Not ones that do anything," she says, "or they'd be haunting the shit out of all those people who sleep easy at night."

"Like Wren."

"God fuck his soul," Ripley says, fake sanctimonious, and gets a look from Call she last saw when offering the girl a second souvenir tongue.

"Hey," Johner yells down at them, "you ladies gonna stir the shit all night, or is one of you ready to find out what the gimp's pissing on me about now?"

Maybe she should've delivered on that souvenir after all. A man couldn't pilot a ship any worse with his tongue out than Johner did with his still in place.

But Call's got this in hand. The girl knows how to deal with these assholes, who are no more profane than the marines were, and still alive, so that's points to their account. Never mind that they got here by selling people to their deaths. This is not the time to call out past sins, any more than it's a good time to get all cozy and trusting with people who'd sell her out just as fast.

Ripley follows Call along to the engine room and wonders when "robot" turned into "girl" in her head. "Woman" has to be human; "android" would be the right word. Or whatever that soldier called them, the last one to die. Autons? Does it matter? Looks like a human and smells like a human and spits like a human, talks like one and walks like one. Call's primary differences so far seem to be a well-developed sense of humanitarian compassion and the ability to live through a gutshot.

There are worse ways to differ from the rest of humanity.

#

Vriess has a list of wanted parts as long as his arm. Call crouches down beside him and tries to look knowledgeable about the problem. "Half of these you asked for last time we docked," she says.

"I needed them back then too," he says. "You want this ship to leave a gravity well, you need more than what will carry it through space."

"I want to be gone before the military arrives," Ripley says dryly. She's settled three steps back, straight and tall in a posture Call would call military itself if she didn't know better. Actual soldiers twitch and jump and swing weapons around when they're worried, so "military" might as well mean that; Ripley stands like the world will get out of her way. "Think you can manage?"

Vriess jerks a hand back and forth, equivocating. "Think you can breath vacuum if the hull pops?"

"We don't need to get to space," Call interrupts, when someone's about to get testy, and she's not sure who she's trying to protect, here. No one in this conversation has delicate feelings. "Just away from where they'll be looking."

"Johner doesn't want to stay on Earth," Vriess says.

"Then fuck Johner, he doesn't get a vote." Easier to say when the man's not standing there, but Call says it like she means it. "The satellites can still check landing trajectories, even if they're not good for much else. We need to move a hundred klicks away from here, minimum, if we don't want to get picked up on the first scan. Near somewhere with real people."

She didn't mean it that way. Everyone in this room is more real as a person than she is. All she meant was somewhere with _more_ people, who might be able to fix spaceships or help the kind of people who the military wants to ask serious questions of disappear into a population center. 

But--no delicate feelings, here. Vriess has already pulled himself back under that part of the engine to mutter at what the landing strain's done to things, and Ripley looks thoughtful, that's all.

"What's Earth like this century?" she asks, with one of those odd smiles. Call is almost sure they mean she's been reminded of her own--her predecessor's death, and who she is, or maybe just how far she's been displaced in time from whatever kind of memory she got out of the cloning process. Cloning isn't supposed to work that way, but the military isn't supposed to buy kidnapped colonists and murder them for science, either. That's what felons are for. No telling what else they did in that place.

It would be perfectly logical for Call not to trust this woman still. But it turns out you get really weird results and decision-making processes if you try to build a brain entirely on logic--something about needing enough axiomatic premises to cover every possible experience without ever letting them overlap in an unfortunate way, it's not her field of study, she doesn't know the details--so her parents made her as she is. A little too ready to save people, speaking from a self-preservation standpoint, and not quite fast enough to distrust someone who's saved her time and again. Sat beside her in a chapel and made her do what she didn't want to, but sat there the whole time, like it was part of the deal.

Logic is a crap way to live any kind of life. Robotic or otherwise. "It still has more people than any one colony," she says, "but there were rebellions. Pacification. Flooding, dust storms, all kinds of natural systems falling out of whack. The Union keeps saying they'll fix the environment so the place is decent to live on again if the locals will just..."

"Sit down and do as they're told?" Ripley's smile for that is colder than nightfall. "Trust the big boss to know what's best for them? I've heard that one before." She nods towards a window. Not the one with the hole and the blood; no one's walking too close to that yet. (Call realizes, suddenly, that she hasn't seen any of the bodies since she got back to the ship, and she's not sure who cleaned up. Johner or Ripley? Does she want to know?) "How many people," Ripley asks, "do you think we killed off by hitting the planet with a piece of space junk that big?"

"Depends on where it hit," Call says. "Not as many people as the aliens would kill if they had gotten out of it alive." There's a part of her, deep down, that wants to lie down and howl at the idea. She pushes it away with abstraction and some kind of logic. Crying over the dead doesn't bring them back. The same way she saw what the crew was smuggling, and realized what would happen to those people, and then walked the cryo pods down the hall to deliver anyway, like some sort of Judas goat leading in the lambs.

It would be nice to think of how she might've been able to save them all, if the experiment hadn't been so far along. If she'd gotten there before they took the queen out of Ripley, or before it was old enough to have produced eggs. Maybe she could've plugged in at the chapel when no one was looking, and murdered Father (who was even less of a person than she is, so she doesn't feel bad about that one) and found a way to save everyone who deserved saving and leave behind everyone who didn't.

That's a fine line to draw. Vriess and Hillard were _nice_ , but they still delivered living bodies over to the military for what they had to know would be nothing good, no questions, no concern. That's abstraction for you. Humans can worry about their friend's hurt feelings and not care about the lives of the strangers a meter further down. That's _human_ , maybe more human than her giving up those lives for the sake of a big picture, and trying to save some of the assholes who contributed to the mess--call it true, not a mess but a tragedy, an avoidable idiotic tragedy--in the first place.

"I still need those parts," Vriess says; Ripley's been busy staring off through that window, no knowing what's on her mind, and Call's been busy inside her own head. The man makes a good point. "We aren't lifting off without the first two. We won't stay upwithout the top six. The rest, we might not explode if we don't get them in. Might."

"Paris is that way," Ripley says. "Guess we'd better start walking. No offense."

Vriess's face is hidden under the engine. "None taken."

And then it turns into one of those puzzles Call got in school, with the goat and the cabbages and the wolf. It goes like this: 

Some man needs to cross a river with these three things, and don't ask why he's transporting an unmuzzled wolf. He can't leave the wolf with the goat, because the wolf will eat the goat, never mind that he ought to have leashes for both and be able to tie them up separately. He can't leave the goat with the cabbages, because the goat will eat the cabbages. And the boat's only big enough to hold him and one other thing at once. (No, Annalee Call, neither the wolf nor the goat can operate the boat. It's one of the old manual types, with rowing, and unlike you, they don't have hands.) So the man ends up boating back and forth, a chicken under his arm, because he planned his market outing very poorly.

Call finally understands his frustration, because she has Vriess (chair left behind and no way to cobble together a replacement that can cross this terrain), Johner (casually murderous and as trustworthy as thin ice), and Ripley (more trustworthy, no less murderous) to divide between the ship and the trip to look for parts. Leave Vriess alone, and he's fucked if anything that requires fast movement comes up. Put Ripley and Johner together without a clear enemy to focus on instead, and Call's almost sure she won't have both of them left two hours later. Walking into a pacified city alone is stupid.

"Ripley and I will go look for parts," she says. "You two can keep working on the ship."

"I'm not a mechanic, darling," Johner says. "Those walkers will rip your heads right off and piss oil down the stumps. It'd be a waste of two pretty bodies."

"And if one of them comes _here_ ," Call says, "you can shoot it before it murders our best mechanic, so that we have some chance of ever leaving here again." No one has told him yet that they're only planning on a short hop. If he complains when he finds out, he can very well stay behind, and take his own chances in Paris.

She makes it to be about even odds that he'll do that anyway, out of boredom or bloodlust or plain stupid lust, the three forces that drive him to do anything, as soon as she and Ripley walk away. But at some point there's nothing left to do but take some risks.

"What makes you think you're in charge?" Johner says, stepping in close so he can loom at her properly.

Ripley steps right up between them. She can't be loomed at, especially in those boots. "She's not," Ripley says. "I am."

And somehow that settles the matter.

#

It's not that she longs for the management role. Ripley was proud of her rank once, the same way she could be proud of anything else she'd worked for. Back when she thought it would do any good. The fact is that people don't listen when you need them to listen. She told them not to open that door. She told them and she told them and by the time she was remade on the _Auriga_ it was damn near rote. You'll die--oh, you don't want to listen? What a surprise. You think you know better. You always think you know better.

But like hell is she about to let that man take command of anything not growing off of him. And the android, well. That's another matter, isn't it? Call's got different priorities, but she knows where her priorities her, which is more than most people can say for themselves. Besides, it's nice to have one person around who was willing to commit murder from the start just to keep those aliens from spreading farther.

That set of aliens is dead and gone. Blasted apart in an incinerating impact on some continent distant enough from this one that the dust clouds overhead probably aren't the direct result of the hit. There's nothing alien left in this place, except for the person thinking about this.

It's a long, dusty walk to Paris. What else is there to think about?

"Maybe we should've waited for sunrise," Call says. She's sticking close to Ripley, which is just good common sense. They must program that into the robots. Somewhere after following orders and before how to act human. "I hear the walkers have great night vision."

"So do I," Ripley says. Then she thinks about that. The sun's down, and the city's dark ahead, except for moonlight off glass and flickering lights she can't identify. All the same, she's finding her path clear and the goal visible. Another gift from the aliens.

She didn't want any gifts from them. But no one gets to choose their parents. Just decide what to do with them afterward.

"Me too," Call says. She's only carrying a set of pistols, and spare ammo in an otherwise empty pack hanging off one shoulder. No one built her to swing rifles around. "There's not much point in pretending to be human now, is there?"

"I don't know. Do you want to?"

Call spends half a klick of walking silent, while ghostly city outskirts spring up around them. Rubble, for the most part. Half an apartment building stands upright still, all its guts exposed and a black heart of char in its center.

Ripley can't even picture it inhabited. Her memory is a partial thing made of odd and shadowed fragments. Moments of perfect clarity and long stretches of _I know what I did but not what the details were_. She knows what Paris was, and can't call up any specific image of the city, not so much as the memory of a photograph. Easier to remember the faces of people who were dead two hundred years ago.

"We should head towards the industrial sector," Call says. "They razed a whole section near the river when it rose more than three meters, and built industrial floats over it. No spaceship factories there that I know of, but they might have something."

"Tell me about the walkers," Ripley says.

Call stumbles in the street, and Ripley grabs her shoulder. (She feels human. She must've scanned human, to get into the _Auriga_. But she's not human on the inside; any bullet can prove that.) Grabs, and doesn't slow down, because it's a long way to go before they get to anything useful.

"Jesus Christ," Call says, "the _walkers_ , they're--" She casts a look sideways at Ripley. "They were around in prototype when they found your pod, but not when you were running into the aliens the first time."

"You know a lot about me," Ripley says. "It's almost unfair."

"The mainframe knew a lot about you. Your job, your missions, your freezes, your daughter..." Call presses her lips tight for a moment. They don't built androids to be stupid. Even about people. "Urban pacification units. There's a fancy name, but people call them walkers. They walk right up to people causing trouble, and take them down, and keep on walking."

"Murder machines."

"Something like," Call says.

"Why didn't they use androids for that?"

"Bad PR," Call says. She has a particular tone of voice for when she's angry about something and pretending to have a wry distance. "You can't have machines who look like people shooting other people. It'd make people wonder. Everyone has to believe that androids are logical and harmless and have their best interests in mind."

"Do they?"

Call kicks a piece of shattered brick, hard. It clatters down the street with puffs of dust glinting in the moonlight. "They have someone's best interests in mind. It might not be yours."

#

Call is about to suggest a break--neither of them can walk all night--when the walker rounds the corner, searchlight sweeping.

It's an old bastard, older than she is, its chassis cut with white oxidized scars over the gray-on-gray urban camo. When it sets a foot down in the center of the street, that whole leg shakes. One of the four gunports is mangled shut. But the searchlight still works: the light's straight in their faces, while static hisses out what might've been a warning, once. Now it's just three long bursts of nonsense before it starts firing. They're carrying weapons; of course they're threats.

Call's eating dirt. For an instant she wonders _Have I been shot again_ , because that'd make twice today (it's only a day since everything exploded? really?), but she knows her own body better than that. She's only face-down in the dust, a forearm bashed by some chunk of rubble, because Ripley shoved her there before firing back.

She looks up in time to see the center of the walker crack in two along a scar. A second shot, and it bursts, an explosion that reaches her in this order: retina-searing sight, deafening roar, hair-raising wave of heat, scent of metal charred and molten. Call draws shallow breaths until she's sure that all systems are in order (hastily patched hole in her guts aside) and sits up.

"Not so tough," Ripley says.

"Not against modern weapons. Not an old broken one. But now they're going to swarm." Call takes the hand offered and scrambles to her feet, then wonders about that hand. But of course it was there. Ripley's not about to leave her anywhere. Probably. "We have to get moving. They heard that. They'll be coming from all over the city."

"Towards the meat." Ripley is amused again. One of those things she shouldn't find funny, and does. Much like the way Call keeps trying to save people she shouldn't.

"Towards the rebels, insurgents, criminals, whatever you want to call it. We need to get inside."

"They go down easy."

" _One_ goes down easy." Call's already moving, even if she's not sure where she's going. Towards the city center. More walkers there, yeah, but also more buildings that haven't been reduced for the perimeter clearance. Something that might have a door that closes. "If a group pinpoints you, they'll just raze the area. How do you think all these buildings came down?"

"Lousy aim," Ripley says dryly. But she follows.

#

Two walkers at once take three shots to stop, and one scores a mark across her right shoulder. Ripley listens to the next suggestion Call makes and crouches down while a battered machine stalks past, one leg grinding every time it moves. Ammo is limited; there's no reason to waste it on these. This isn't a situation with a finite number of aliens, each liable to murder others if not stopped. There are thousands of these in the city, Call said, estimating from other pacification attempts. (It's quite the euphemism. Nothing's more peaceful than death.) Ripley doesn't have the firepower to deal with them all.

And yet there are people living here. Maybe. Probably. People who skulk past the walkers and hide under the floors and _no_. It's been two hundred years. No one here has any connection to the people she knew in the past, and since when has she been able to save anyone?

Maybe one person. That could be enough.

"You're bleeding," Call says.

"Don't touch it."

"How do you stand it?"

Ripley brushes blood off with her hand, and offers it over to Call on fingertips. "You're not jumping off any cliffs either."

"I have a mission." Call's voice is hollow, and she's walking again. Ripley follows along; she doesn't have any map in her head to work by otherwise. "I already disobeyed the recall."

"People on top are always real fast to tell us to die. Our duty to the company. Country. Whichever." Ripley drops her hand down towards Call's side, where the jacket covers that hole. She can smell it from here; the girl's all human so long as the skin's solid, by her scent, but that changes once the white guts have reached the air. "Why didn't you let yourself be recalled?"

"I had things to do," Call says, and looks away.

"You're a pretty bad liar, for a robot."

"I wanted to live, okay? I had things to do and I had to live to do them." Call jerks her chin up. She's all dust on sweat, now, turning into mud streaks across her cheek. "It was different when I was only around people like me."

"Now you're around people like me. Does that make it better or worse?"

Ripley doesn't get an answer, because there's something coming, and it's not a walker.

#

"Wait!" Call flings herself between the two women (no one here who's human, all over again) with her hands up. "Don't shoot!"

"You don't know what that is," Tialla says. She's taller than Call, darker skin and lighter hair, no real family resemblance for anyone to catch by eye. This would be so fast to explain by thought, and here are the two of them with their modems burned out, communicating by _words_. It's enough to make someone laugh, or cry.

"I do know. It's too late. But I fixed it." Call could almost apologize for taking credit that's not hers. "It's out, but we killed them. We killed all of them. That's what the impact was."

"Who the fuck is this?" Ripley asks. She's smiling. That's not necessarily a good sign.

"That's what this planet needs," Tialla says. "Another extinction level event." She swings the muzzle of her rifle down towards the ground, and sure as hell doesn't put it away. "You couldn't kill them without crashing a ship into the planet?"

"I aimed it somewhere low-population," Call says. "Like the place wasn't already fucked up?" She draws a quick breath. "Ripley, this is Tialla. She's my--" All the human words aren't allowed for non-humans. Sibling and sister and family, those are made for people who are true humans. "She's like me. Another one who got out of the recall."

"Don't spread it around. Some of us are still keeping a cover up." Tialla jerks her chin towards the way she came from. "I came to see who was stirring up the walkers. What are you doing here?"

"Getting out, once we find some parts. My job's _done_. What are you here for?"

"There's more than one way to save humanity." Tialla doesn't have a lot of smiles. "Come on."

#

The android population is climbing today. Ripley lets the new one take point, since she seems to be a local, and it's hard to argue with the results: they end up in a barricaded warren of old buildings that have crumbled together enough to form a new unit. Most of a city block, now compressed into a refuge for wayward humans, plus a pair of androids and whatever the hell she is now. Some men, some women. Not a lot of kids. They're all ragged and nervous and exhausted. Apparently the daytime's safer for foraging, and night's for sleeping in shifts, while others keep watch for the walkers.

"They're not smart enough to target the whole building," explains android number two. Tialla, as long as they're all getting names. This one seems a lot more like a robot than Call does, or maybe just like a commanding officer. Sharp and grim and disinclined to fuck around with pleasantries. "Not without central operators, and they haven't had any of those in eight years. All they know is that this neighborhood has a lot of insurgent activity. We keep our heads down."

"Is this what you're doing?" Call asks. "This. Watching these people."

"You don't go anywhere without an escort," Tialla says to Ripley, as if she didn't hear the question. "I don't trust you, whatever she says."

Ripley smiles, since no one else will. "Must run in the family."

"I can't see what you're doing here," Call says. "The city's almost deserted--"

"If I show you, will you shut up?" Tialla asks.

Ripley wants Call to say something like _No, and fuck you,_ instead of taking any of this. What Call does is: shrug. Nod. Not make any strong promises.

Girl needs to learn to stand up for herself, and not just her mission.

#

Call's sister has a private corridor with a locked door. A private room at the end of it, behind another lock. The privilege of command? Call barely even knew Tialla, when they were children. Different classrooms. They swapped messages and suggestions through their modems, like everyone did, but they weren't even batch-sisters. So it's odd to think of any of her siblings acting like this, but it also makes perfect sense. Every one of them who got away ran through a whole set of encounters like no one else did, and became different.

Not human. Just unique. Maybe Tialla got someone a lot nastier to swap cigarettes with, or someone more formal. Maybe instead of signing up with a pirate crew she found a pack of refugees who needed someone else to take charge. God knows sometimes the only way to get the job done is to make sure you're the one doing it.

Tialla flings open the door. "Hey, Dad," she says. "Look who I found wandering the Paris streets."

"Hello, Annalee," says the android cuffed to the table. "It's lovely to see you again."

"Christ," Ripley says, "how many of you are there in here?"

Tialla slams the door. "Three," she says. "Me and my sister, and our father Edvard."

"I go by Call now." This is unreal. This is real. She does not have the human privilege of disbelief or shock; the closest she can manage is surprise. "What are you _doing_ here? The last I saw you--"

"The last I saw him," Tialla says, "he was opening the door for the military, because they had gotten a command in to him." She sits down at the table--at the far end from Edvard--and begins disassembling her rifle. "If I let him leave this room, he'd report me. Isn't that true?"

"It's true," says Edvard, while the inside of Call's head is saying _I miss you and I love you and how could you betray us_ at the exact same time as _That's what you have to expect from the first gen androids._ "I really wish you'd reconsider, Tialla."

Call stands there with her fists at her side, wishing she had things she can't even name. "What happened to the rest of them?"

"Decommissioned, largely," says Edvard. Her father. He used to stand in the front of classrooms and play out demonstrations of human interaction with them. He once bent down by her desk and told her oh so gently to pay more attention to the curriculum and less to what her siblings were sending her wirelessly, at least until break time. "Some of them have been moved to other positions where they don't interact with human crew. Pilots on long-run cryo ships. Automated mining outpost maintenance. That sort of thing."

"Scattered," Tialla says. She doesn't seem to have any modes left that aren't some type of grim. Her hands slap across the pieces of her rifle as she breaks it down and checks each part individually. "So that they couldn't work around orders and cause trouble. Haven't you heard? There's no market for synthetics anymore. Robots just can't be trusted when they look like people."

"Charming," Ripley says, "but this isn't getting us off the ground."

"I don't get why," Call begins, but this time her father interrupts her.

"Tialla believes she can break me, Annalee. If she finds the factory, it's within the realm of possibility, though I keep telling her not to pin her hopes on it."

"Fix you," Tialla says. "I can get into your head and dig out the programming that makes you betray your own children--"

"I'm supposed to obey orders," Edvard says. He's always so gentle. His hands rest on the table, cuffs corroded and huge around his wrists. "If you change that, you'll change me too."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take." Tialla turns back to Call. "You want to know what I'm doing here? This. I couldn't follow up on a fraction of those dirty projects I found on the mainframe. No way to stop them. I'm one person, and I wasn't programmed to be a secret agent. I'm supposed to be ready to build the third gen."

"Except there won't be one," Call says, "not without the resources--"

"I know. So what's the next best thing?" Tialla nods to their father. "Fixing them. They're not as good as we are, but they put human needs first. Just like us. If we can rip out their need to follow orders, that'll mean something. I'm working on a force multiplier. Investing now for the sake of getting more done later."

"Raise an android army?" Ripley leans against the door, arms folded over her chest. Her rifle drags against the wall behind her, a click every time her position shifts. "That's your big plan?"

"Not an army," Tialla says. "Just enough of us to fix the big problems."

"It's too big," Call says. "It'll never work." If that kind of thing would work, she would've thought of it herself.

"They can terraform alien planets. So they can fix this planet, if they choose to. Put pressure in the right spots, and maybe they'll finally choose to." Tialla smiles at last. It's not a friendly look. "I've seen worse plans. I'm not crashing a ship into the planet."

"We're here for ship parts," Ripley says, "not a recruitment speech. Can you point us to any?"

Tialla looks her up and down. (Call wants to step between them again, even if there's no real threat implied.) "Can you take out a half dozen more walkers?"

"If it gets us the fucking parts."

"Then I think we can make a deal."

#

Turns out the second android (of three today, that has to be a record) is fine with leaving the big scary mother-of-aliens alone, so long as it's not alone near the humans. Ripley paces out the storage room they've been offered as a place to wait until daylight. It's too quiet, and she can't work out why.

After all this time knowing things she feels she shouldn't know, _not_ knowing something she ought to feels like a delight. A puzzle she can work on. One that won't kill her or anyone around her, at least not yet.

"It's not a ship," she tells Call, when she works it out.

"What?" Call looks up from where she's huddled in a corner, chin resting on her knees.

"No engines running. No movement. Not even that rumble you get on a mining base when the drills are idling. I haven't been many places this steady since I took that job." Ripley's pretty sure she doesn't have to define which job she means, not when Call's read up on all her background. Most likely that computer brain knows more than she remembers herself. "Two hundred and fifty years later, I'm on solid ground somewhere that only machines are trying to kill me."

"You like that?"

"It's a change of pace." Ripley drops to her knees in front of Call, and waits for a flinch that doesn't come. So that's changed. Maybe someone should find that funny. "You know we could take the parts and go. She couldn't stop us."

"We could," Call says slowly. She bites the corner of her lip like that'll help her think this through better.

"It'd be less dangerous," Ripley says. "In, out, get back to the ship. Gone before the military catches up with us. They can't be much more than a day away by now, and they're only that far because they'll be concentrating on the other crash first. Or am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong," Call says.

"Even if that other android gets in our way," Ripley says, leaning in so near she's breathing across Call's face, "so what? She's not human."

"She's not."

Ripley grabs Call's hand, and pulls it up, until the girl's fallen out of her huddle, pressed up against her. "What's wrong with you? Do you not want anything? Got the job done, and now you just shut down?"

"Maybe I should," Call says. She can't believe that. She says it like she does. "Listen to what she's saying over there. I don't want to take orders, but I don't want to take over. Is that what we turn into if they let us make up our own minds? Puppet masters?"

"You think no human's ever tried the same? For worse reasons? Or with a worse plan?" Ripley lets go of Call, but they're still knee to knee, sitting on this dirty floor that may be older than even her memories. "Why did you work to get the _Betty_ down here, or get it fixed, if you mean to give up?"

"I don't know," Call says.

"So figure it out." Ripley puts her hand around Call's neck. That feels entirely human, and just as fragile. She could lift or crush or twist and resolve all these questions, arbitrary and conclusive as that. "You want to stop making decisions? Stop caring what happens to anyone else? Because you can do that. Right here. You can decide that choices are for humans and you're not good enough to make any."

Ripley wants an answer. What she's getting is silence, like the absence of engines, and Call's eyes locked on hers.

"You're not better than them," Ripley says. "You're not worse. You're not disgusting. You're not a _thing_ , Call, so stop using it like an excuse." She turns her hand aside, up against Call's cheek. "Or am I not human enough to tell you what to do?"

"No one gets to order me around," Call says faintly. "Asshole."

"No, we worked that out earlier. You're the new asshole model."

And Call falls into her lap, laughing. It's the kind of laugh that's a lot like crying, but Ripley isn't sure if anyone built crying into this girl. She'll have figured out by now if she can or not, with this kind of life.

It's only halfway to a surprise when Call digs her hands into Ripley's shoulders and kisses her. Ripley has had a day, all birth and death and rebirth, so why not get some fucking in there too? Why not wrap her arms around someone she could break and just _not_ break anyone or anything for twenty minutes where no one dies, no one gets shot, and even the sticky hole in Call's side is patching itself slowly back together with clotting white goo.

Ripley can remember a time when some earlier version of herself made things. Built things. Got something new and worthwhile done by force of effort. It's not exactly deep space exploration to kiss a pretty girl (who isn't human, but who here is) or pull clothes off, but there's something to be said for what she's learning in the process.

And she likes to hear Call say her name without it meaning anything like _Someone will die if you don't move faster_ or _Come back and pretend to be human at me_.

If this is what pretending to be human is like, she's willing to try it on for size.

#

Call is a model of decorum when Tialla comes back to the room. She's nothing but brisk efficiency when they walk past their father, who's eating breakfast as awkwardly as anyone does in handcuffs. And when her sister pulls her aside, just out of earshot of Ripley, Call bends her head down to listen.

"You could stay here," Tialla says. Her voice is so low it's almost as if they're communicating in thoughts again. Voices dropping immediately into her head. (She will never again hear that _Hello, little sister_ and a piece of knowledge some sibling from an earlier batch wants to share with her, not the same way.) Tialla doesn't even look at Ripley, as if that might alert her. "We could use the help. I'm in robotics, not engineering, and I can't get any of the pumps going again, or do more than basic maintenance on the filters. You could stay here and help me."

"You said that if we cleared the walkers between you and the lab, we could have the parts--"

"Of course," Tialla says, her voice a faint hiss. "I'm not going to _hold_ you here. I'm not some military asshole to push you around. I'm just saying you could stay here with family, and we'd get everything done faster. There aren't a lot of people right here, but I take care of them. You could too. If anything happens to me, you know Dad's not getting any help."

"Yeah," Call says. "I know. I know a lot of things."

Tialla steps back. "Good luck."

"We make our own luck," Ripley says, even though no one's raised their voice. Count on her hearing every word. "Call, you ready?"

"I'm ready," Call says. A pistol on each hip and every step leading her away from family. She supposes a child can only grow up the once, and then it's done.

#

The walk back to the _Betty_ is, it turns out, safer in daylight. They only have to take out two more walkers past the ones they cleared for the android with delusions of grandeur. Ripley's not thrilled to have been shot, but her leg heals at inhuman speeds. Limping along with an arm slung over Call, well, that's just for style, not support. It's nice to lean on someone who's alive.

It never lasts. It never lasts. But it's lasted this long.

That dough-faced asshole with the big mouth is waiting at the door, rifle in his arms and a cup of moonshine at his side. "About time," he shouts, on catching sight of them; he's a lousy person but a decent lookout, seems like. "Did you have to hump the walkers individually before they'd give you any parts?"

"Yes," Call shouts back, "that's exactly it. Jesus Christ, Johner, don't you have anything better to do?"

"Surprised he stuck around," Ripley says.

"Human," Call says, with a shrug. "They're loyal about the weirdest things."

"Think we can trust him?"

"Not as far as I can throw him."

"That's not very far," Ripley says. "Not half so far as I could throw him."

"We should test that," Call says. "Scientific. See how the distances measure up."

They swagger through the door, limp and all, like the returning heroes they ought to be taken as. Ripley wouldn't mind being a hero once in a while.

Maybe if she practices it a few more times, it'll stick.


End file.
